Social media is gaining more and more prevalence in the business landscape with significant consequences for the businesses community. Online social media sites like Facebook and Twitter each have a large membership base. A public post by a member of one of these social sites can be quickly shared and viewed by many users online. This has significant implications for business marketing and brand management. A satisfied customer can help promote a service or product by posting a glowing review online, or negatively impact a business via a negative comment.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method that allows a business to monitor the social media landscape for posts, mentions, conversations, blogs, and other chatter (generally referred to as posts or social media interactions) about the business to determine whether the business is to respond to such posts by, for example, engaging in conversation with the authors of such posts. To facilitate such engagement, it is further desired for the system and method to enable the business to interact with an author of a post via the same social media channel, and to switch to another media channel where it would be more desirable to continue the interaction via the different media channel. However, customer contact centers often do not have access to users' social media identifiers (e.g. Twitter handle, Facebook ID, or the like), and thus, there is no link between such social media identifiers and information typically stored in a customer relation database (e.g. customer's account number, email address, phone number, and the like). Accordingly, it is desirable to make the link between the original social media interaction and the new interaction when switching to the new interaction channel.